Vee steps up onto a low wall, unzips her camera bag, and takes out her beloved old Olympus OM-1. Once she started using this model – in ’75, maybe – she didn’t see that she ever needed anything fancier, better, or more sophisticated. Instead she bought another body, then another, all the same, and she went out into the world with one round her neck and a spare slung over her shoulder. This is her implement and her weapon, and they have been through enough together to work as one. Vee loops the worn, warm strap around her neck, clips off the lens cap – she loves the tension then give of the movement – then palms it into her pocket. When she does this, she isn’t seventy and dying. She’s twenty and anxious, thirty and assertive, forty and confident, fifty and at the top of her game. She’s sixty and learning herself all over again. She’s Veronica Moon: photographer, observer, force.

She lifts the camera to her face and her left eye finds the viewfinder, relaxes into the way of seeing it invites. Her right eye closes, and the place between her eyebrows rests against the top of the camera. Vee’s left eye is, has always been, the one that wants to do the looking – a camera has never felt right to her when she tries to use her right eye – so when she takes a shot she has to move her head away to wind the film on, with the lever at the top right. She used to envy photographers who took shot after shot without needing to take the camera from their right eye, winding on as they looked, but now she realises that that second of grace and refocus gives her the chance to find something a fraction better than what she had in the last frame.

Erica glances around, looking for her, and Vee smiles, then makes a shooing motion with her free hand; Erica does not need her, here, and she definitely does not need Erica. A photographer is a solitary thing, half-person, half-camera. Her feet are solid and her hands are steady, as serious as they have always been when they are working.

Vee scans through and over the crowd, waits for something to snag her eye. First it’s a woman with a child of five or six on her shoulders, the woman reaching a hand up and the child reaching for it, both of them smiling, neither able to see the other’s face. She presses the shutter, winds on, settles in again, looking for another image. A better one, this time.